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Since the 1980s Bustamante’s work has been developing in a constant exchange between three-dimensional, conceptual sculptural works and photographic images of landscape and architecture. The double attention to the tableau as an object and a signifier, to the tense relationship between the representation and what is represented, the object and the image, is also a hallmark of the “L.P.” series. The photographs show views of Swiss lakes. Since the emotionally charged travel literature and painters of the late 18th century these have been regarded as the embodiment of the power of nature calmed, and the primeval world idyllically tamed by the force of human industriousness. Today they are part of the basic repertory of the routinely produced output of the postcard and calendar industry. The emphasis of the monumental presentation in the work of Bustamante shifts to become a melancholy reflection about the fact that the world is not in fact a peepshow. The ephemeral and commonplace come into the picture and turn out to be no less fascinating than the eternal and sublime. The result is photographic lyricism based on personal experience, the landscape becomes a still-life, an arrangement of things from nature and civilisation, impregnated with a baroque appeal based on transitoriness, completely in accordance with the intuition of Jean Paulhan (from his Guide d’un petit voyage en suisse) quoted by the artist as a motto for the whole series: “So, living is not all that easy.”